The Gift Of Poetry…
…poetry…speaks as no other language can. It does what no other art form can do. It compresses experience; it intensifies language; it uses words to say the unsayable…Poetry cracks open our everyday lives, the mundane worlds in which we spend so much unconscious time. It releases the extraordinary bringing us to a different level of consciousness. But poems do more than describe sounds or scenes. They actually become the sounds or scenes. You read a poem about the resurrection and you know a bit of what it feels like to have restored and renewed flesh. In order to have this effect poetry must ‘upset the ordinary ’ in some way.
Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, Silver Catching the Midday Sun in the Beauty of God